He moved on, looking into the faces of the souls as he passed them.
Rended, twisted, cleft, pierced, or severed. Eyeless, jawless, noseless, or even entirely faceless. This was humanity. Or most of it. Thrust into Hell by their own hand, by their irresistible weaknesses. This was what they had made of themselves. He felt neither sympathy nor disdain. Just an odd belonging that he was not sure felt very good.
War, it had been whispered, was again looming. Long files of legionaries and officers were everywhere, but he passed them confidently; they had no reason, as yet, to be looking for him. Once they knew he was missing it would not matter that he was surrounded by millions of souls just like him. The Burden would betray him. That was its purpose.
Hani pushed on in what he came to think of as an exercise not of stealth or speed but of patience. The milky Acheron vanished behind the blocks of low buildings as he walked farther up toward the city's center. With all his walking, though, he was amazed at how the center mount never seemed any closer.
Sounds of torment emanated from within most of the low, featureless buildings along the avenue, sounds that Hani barely heard anymore. Most of the meaty exteriors were punctured by a window, and, as he passed these, everything from sobs to screams reached out onto the street. None of it shocked him; his work-gangs had labored in proximity to buildings like these frequently, and his own curiosity about their inhabitants had long ago been satisfied. These were simply the places where the worst souls were kept and punished, their torments in many cases gruesomely tailored to their crimes.
Hani looked ahead, trying to penetrate the clots of souls and legionaries and Scourges, and saw a contingent of demon phalangites some hundred feet away. Larger and more solid than most demons, they strode slowly through the crowds, long hand-pikes shouldered, intentionally trampling any hapless soul too slow to avoid them. In fact, Hani thought, it appeared that they were going out of their way to inflict damage on the crowd.
Hani decided to duck into the first open doorway that he could find; demons rarely entered domiciles. A procession of odd foreigners stumbled past him, eyeless, beating hand-drums and in some kind of chanting trance. Were they souls? He could not tell, but he used them to hunker behind nonetheless, entering the nearest building unseen.
Within the dimly lit cell the air was thick and foul, redolent of smoking flesh. Burning embers, the odor's source, provided the only faint light. In the room's center was a solitary seated figure. Oversized and gangrenous entrails spilled from within him, forming the seatlike pedestal to which he was forever affixed. A long stream of saliva descended from his mouth and onto his glistening, embedded arms.
He was moaning and it took a few moments for him to realize he was not alone.
"Who's there?" the soul whispered, his voice strained and filled with pain. He tried to move his head, but large growths, arranged like a grotesque necklace, inhibited him. "I know you're there ... who are you?"
Hani ignored him.
"Why won't you say something?" The soul began to sob, his body convulsing. The organs wobbled and Hani looked away.
"Shut up!"
"Ha," he wheezed, "you're in my cell and you tell me to shut up!"
Hani peered cautiously around the door frame. The phalangites were nearer, and he could clearly hear the cries of the pedestrians and their bones snapping underfoot. He pulled his head back in and turned to face the soul.
"There is a problem out on the street. I'll be gone when it's passed."
"You're a soul. What are you doing running around on your own?"
"That's my business."
The phalangites must be very close, Hani thought. Like waves breaking before the bow of a barge on the Acheron, he saw the crowd just outside begin to part, falling and crashing into one another in an effort to avoid being trampled.
Hani caught a glimpse of the phalangites' armored thighs as they passed the low doorway.
"What's happening out there?" the soul asked.
"A cohort of phala—"
"No, no, I don't mean just now. I mean ... I am hearing soldiers—lots of soldiers—passing."
"There will be a war," Hani said plainly.
"There is always war."
"This is different. More troop movement. More urgency to it all. It all seems familiar, somehow."
The soul's sudden, snapping cough sent a chill down Hani's spine. "Familiar?" he finally gasped weakly.
"The urgency, the excitement of war. I know this feeling. And seeing all those troops ..." Hani's voice trailed off. The stirrings of his Life were tantalizing, and their wisps were never to be ignored. A series of the most fleeting impressions passed through his mind: a vast, blue sea of water dotted with strange ships, men—not souls—in burnished cuirasses holding swords and spears, and then a field of death with red-washed bodies piled eye high. What it meant Hani could not imagine. But he tucked the memories away, next to the others he had made a mental catalog of. Next to the little statue, they were his most treasured possessions.
"Are you still there?" Hani heard the desperation, the plaintiveness, in the soul's voice; he might have been the soul's first visitor in millennia. The loneliness was incomprehensible.
"Yes."
"Who are you?"
"I don't know."
"Please don't leave. Talk with me for a bit. It's been so long. Hello? Hello? Are you still there?"
Hani backed silently toward the door and then turned and looked out. The street, uncharacteristically silent save for the moans, was painted in fresh, slick blood and crushed souls, many of whom were dragging themselves toward the doorways. Long, wet footprints, like brushstrokes, trailed off in the direction the phalangites had taken.
As he crossed the threshold and walked away from the domicile he could feel the soul's fading, whispered entreaties clawing at his conscience, compelling him to stay. He set his jaw, looked up at the palace, and picked his way through the sliding bodies.
Some miles later, the avenue regained its former aspect, the crowds merely stepping over any residue from the phalangites' passing. The thoroughfare dipped down and Hani faded behind a caravan of lumbering soul-beasts draped in billowing concealing blankets and laden with goods, led by robed guides and destined for the palace. And once again, walking alongside the enormous creatures, he felt that strange stirring of memory. He knew that he had lived before, but as with all souls, that Life and its memories were still opaque. A mystery. As he hid amidst the shuffling creatures' legs, an ember of optimism brightened, fanned by the awareness that he might actually recover his memories, that he might come to know who he had been. He did not know what forces were at play or whether any of these new feelings were due to his possessing the tiny statue. Before he had acquired it there been no such sudden flashes. With a pang of awareness, Hani realized that something had changed, that he was regaining a sense of self that had been forcibly taken from him and that the memories might be a part of some regrowth. It was a brightening thought that he almost dared not to contemplate, but, despite himself, it drove him onward with a growing sense of expectation.
Chapter Thirteen
ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON
Two weeks after Sargatanas' momentous decision Eligor and Valefar descended the long, arcing causeway to the palace gate in uncustomary silence. Both demons were deep in thought, wrestling with the implications of recent events, and when they stopped just outside the gate to await the arrival of Bifrons and Andromalius they remained silent. Much had been accomplished in the brief time since that decision, but much more needed to be done. The two immense shallow-bowled braziers, mounted atop building-sized pedestals that flanked the causeway gate, cast a fluctuating orange glow and deep, wavering shadows upon the guards and the milling crowd below. Their seventy-foot flames reached into the sky with the roar of a dozen furnaces.